[biog]

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"Very, very funny... laugh out loud material" - Front Row, Radio 4

"Excellent ****" - Sunday Times

"Her wit is so caustic it hurts" - The List

"She's shrewd, witty, talented, mightily intelligent, and she can deliver words at well over two a second for an hour" - Time Out

"Pure Class - a star in the making" - The Daily Telegraph

"Close to genius" - The Scotsman

"An enormous writing talent" - The Times

"The country's leading young female stand-up" - Time Out

Television

Natalie is a regular panellist on BBC2's The Review Show, and appeared on Newsnight Review for its final three years, including its 2009 visit to the Cannes Film Festival, and the last ever show in December 2009.

She has appeared as a panellist on BBC 4's The Book Quiz, and on their Poetry Special alongside Andrew Motion and George Szirtes. She has also spoken about 3D film for Channel 4, and Flashforward for Channel 5. She was also a panellist on the geekiest quiz of the modern era - Mindgames, with Simon Singh - and featured in a Liberty Bell series about school reports, Must Try Harder, screened on BBC2 in 2006.

In 2008, Natalie presented a documentary about using comedy in the classroom for Teachers' TV, which you can see here.

She was by far the nerdiest interviewee on a countdown of our Top 100 Television Detectives for Living TV, where she mostly talked about Monk. She's still annoyed that Dr Mark Sloan wasn't on the list. She performed stand-up in the STV/Assembly Television Best of the Fest show in August 2005.

She can occasionally be seen on the news, banging on about Harry Potter (good) and ID Cards (bad). She was also the arts and literature expert (their word, not hers, before you write in...) for the BBC2 quiz show, Knowitalls.

Radio

Natalie's documentary on Greek Tragedy and soap opera, Oedipusenders, was broadcast on Radio 4 in April 2010. Her next documentary, provisionally entitled Attila the Hen, will be about urban chicken keeping.

Natalie has appeared on Woman's Hour, You and Yours, A Good Read, and What's The Point Of...? and she has been a panellist on Banter, Quote Unquote, Personality Test, We've Been Here Before, and Armando Iannucci's Charm Offensive, all on Radio 4. She also reviews the arts for Front Row and Saturday Review.

Natalie wrote and presented Laughing Matters, a documentary about comic writers from Jessica Mitford and Dorothy Parker to Fran Lebowitz and Cynthia Heimel, also for Radio 4, in May 2005. Her second documentary, Classical Comedy, about how modern comedians stole all their jokes from Aristophanes, Juvenal and Martial, was broadcast on Radio 4 in October 2006.

Her stand-up has been featured on Political Animal, 28 Acts in 28 Minutes, and Loose Ends on Radio 4, as well as on BBC 7's Spanking New. She has also appeared in the Radio 4 Pick of the Fringe in 2004 and 2005.

She was a regular panellist on the Anita Anand Show on Radio Five Live, and then appeared alongside Richard Bacon on the same station. She was also the sporadic Latin expert for Macaulay and Co. on BBC Scotland, and she appears on Jeremy Vine's show on Radio 2.

Books

Natalie's new book, The Ancient Guide To Modern Life, will be published by Profile Books in November 2010. It's about how the modern world is more interesting when it's refracted through the prism of the ancient one. You can pre-order it from Amazon here.

Natalie's first novel, The Great Escape, was published by Simon & Schuster in September 2007. It won a PETA Proggy Award, for best animal-friendly children's book, in 2008.

She contributed an essay to An Atheist's Guide To Christmas, profits of which go to the Terrence Higgins Trust. She also wrote an essay for Serenity Found, a book about Joss Whedon's television show, Firefly, edited by Jane Espenson, which was published in autumn 2007 by BenBella Books. Her entries on subjects from Agatha Christie to EF Benson can be found in Cassell's Little Black Book Of Books, published in Autumn 2007.

Journalism

Natalie has been a Guest Contributor for The Times since October 2006, and a regular contributor to The New Humanist. She also writes for the Sunday Times Magazine. She has written for the Sunday Telegraph, The Big Issue, and Loaded.

In December 2007, she spoke at the launch of a Demos report on the information age, FYI: The New Politics Of Personal Information.

Live Work

Five Edinburgh Fringe sell-out runs and national tours:

Natalie has toured internationally - from Dublin and Berlin to Manhattan. She has played virtually every comedy festival in the UK - Glasgow, Brighton, Leicester, London, Birmingham etc.

She is also part of Robin Ince's ridiculous, award-winning collective, The Book Club, and its strange twin, School for Gifted Children. She usually reads from Lee Goldberg's Diagnosis Murder books.